Page 70 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 55

Without downplaying the senselessness of the crime and the faults and
failings of the two boys, Jones also allows them a measure of humanity:
Now they're talking about tearing down all the high-rises and putting
everyone in low-rise buildings as the solution. True, it's a start. But
Tyrone and Johnny could have thrown Eric out of a vacant apartment
in the low-rises and he could have fallen and broken his neck. So
what are you going to do—make the low-rise homes lower? It's more
than just the buildings. You don't know how it is to take a life until
you value life itself. Those boys didn't value life. Those boys didn't
have too much reason to value life. Now they killed someone and
part of them is dead too. (141)
A more recent account of combat consumption is even more disturbing
than the Eric Morse killing, primarily because the accused child killers—
seven and eight years old—were found to be innocent, but only after
many months of police waffling. They had been accused of killing Ryan
Harris, an eleven-year-old girl, for her "shiny blue Road Warrior bi-
cycle" (Slater 1998). The police theory was that the boys wanted the bike
and so whacked the girl over the head with a rock (in some cases de-
scribed as a brick), knocked her to the ground, strangled her by putting
leaves and grass into her nose and mouth, sexually assaulted her, and,
finally, stuffed her panties into her mouth.
While the community from which the children came faced these
charges with incredulity (which was duly noted by the press), a feeding
frenzy emerged around these supposedly crazed children willing to kill for
a bike. Sticking to journalistic ethics and declining to identify the boys,
one Chicago Sun-Times article instead settled for identifying the specific
city blocks on which they lived (Carpenter and Lawrence 1998). In the
end, it turned out the girl had been killed by an adult sex offender, identi-
fied through DNA analysis of semen he'd left on her clothing—evidence
that surfaced only two weeks after the children had been charged with
the crime. None of the media accounts traces the police logic in con-
structing their theory, but I am left wondering how on earth they arrived
at the idea that the two little boys had killed a little girl in order to get her
bike. The children's confessions, it turns out, had been coerced under
technically legal conditions that were nonetheless troubling: there was
no parent or legal counsel present with the children as they were ques-
tioned and the children were never advised of their rights. Their "confes-
sions" and interviews were neither audio- nor videotaped and thus re-
constructed solely through police interrogators' notes.